Oscar Mayer Wienermobile serves up memories, but not hot dogs, around Ann Arbor

The large macaroni noodle spotted outside the Big House in August caused quite a stir, but a less-controversial link to Americana is drawing more positive reviews as it rolls through town.

The Oscar Mayer Wienermobile has been roaming the roads since 1936 promoting Oscar Mayer products. General Motors and Prototype Source cooked up the one recently spotted in Ann Arbor in 2009.

I took some time to ketchup with the self-styled “Hotdoggers” who have been driving the 27-foot-long frankfurter around the city.

After I climbed into the Wienermobile on Fifth Avenue downtown, Sam Blum — a recent graduate from the University of Maryland — directed us to buckle our “meat-belts” before we drove off. Blum’s co-dogger Cokie Reed graduated from the University of Texas in May after spending four years on the Longhorns’ women’s basketball team.

“The best part about the job is the people you meet and some of the things they say,” Reed said. “The kids all just want hot dogs pretty much. We spend a lot of time explaining to people that we don’t have hot dogs or sell hot dogs.”

They do have wiener whistles, coupons, stickers, postcards and keychains to hand out, all of which are kept in a large storage area the back of the van. Blum said that many people who see the van relish the opportunity to reminisce about their childhoods.

“We get a lot of the ‘I remember when’ crowd,” he said. “They’re thrilled to find out we still give out the wiener whistles — those have been around for a long time — and they like telling us about how they saw the Wienermobile 50 years ago or even longer.”

I admittedly belong to the ‘I remember when’ crowd, though my memory doesn’t stretch so far back. When I was 7 years old my parents took my sister and me to Raleigh, N.C. to sing in front of the Wienermobile and audition to be the next “Oscar Kid.”

Ben Freed, now a reporter for The Ann Arbor News sings in front of the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile in Raleigh, N.C., at the age of 7.Freed family photo

It’s unclear who decided that the best outfit for me to wear to the audition would be a matching tie-die tank top and shorts combination (I’m going to go out on a limb and blame my mother) but being much cuter than I was, my sister was named one of the “local winners.”

Thankfully for all involved, that was the end of my semi-professional singing career. Until today.

“The songs are not as big with our generation, and even fewer of the younger kids know them, but the adults pretty much all know the jingles,” Reed said before agreeing to sing with me.

“For me, I just knew the ‘Bologna has a first name song’ pretty much because it was the only way I knew how to spell bologna,” Blum added.

Blum and Reed are two of 12 Hotdoggers currently touring America in the six Wienermobiles. Before hitting the road, they were mustard together for a rigorous training regimen at Oscar Mayer headquarters in Madison, Wis.

“We were at Hot Dog High for about two weeks and it was actually a lot of fun,” Reed said. “You learn how to run an event, drive the Wienermobile and handle any sort of situations that might come up on the road.”

After graduation, the teams spread out across the country. Each team gets a region to cover and its first itinerary. Blum said Oscar Mayer gets more than 10,000 requests every year for frankfurter appearances.

“We get our schedule for the next few weeks and then we start calling the hotels where we’ll be,” he said. “We try to negotiate rates with them, and sometimes they’ll cut us a deal because other people staying love having the Wienermobile outside.”

On top of their normal duties, the teams have been competing in a “Wienermobile Run” competition over the summer. Reed and Blum have been working to complete challenges issued by the company and fans as they try to amass points.

The pair broke a world record by dropping a hot dog into a bun from 85 feet in the air and Reed had a Wienermobile tattooed onto her foot as part of the experience.

“One of the craziest experiences so far was trying to drive a 27-foot-long hotdog through New York City,” Reed said. “And it was all six of us having to try to drive in a line. That was pretty tough.”

Once they complete their one-year tour of duty, Blum said the “frankternity” of Hotdoggers remains robust and is about 400 people strong, many of whom still work in the public relations and advertising world.

“It’s a pretty tight community. One former hotdogger from the mid-1990s tracked us down when we were in Hartford,” he said.

“She invited us back to her house for dinner and we spent some time with her family and looking through old pictures of when she was touring.”

The Wienermobile will be rolling out of town on Friday, heading off to a wedding in Madison that — given the recent cold front — could be a bit chili.